London Calling: Recore and will.i.am

LONDON – What do Recore Systems BV and William Adams, otherwise known as rapper will.i.am, have in common?

Recore Systems (Enschede, The Netherlands), a 2005 fabless startup, has recently presented a reliable data processor to the European Space Agency.

Recore's FPGA-based prototype dubbed MPPB (Massively Parallel Processor Breadboarding system, ESA contract 21986) includes reconfigurability techniques in support of fault tolerance.

Recore develops parallel reconfigurable digital signal processing intellectual property around its Montium and Xentium accelerator cores and the company was asked to produce a reliable processor by the European Space Research and Technology Centre (Noordwijk, The Netherlands) part of the European Space Agency.

Data processing on-board spacecraft and satellites is subject to high radiation levels and European rad-hard DSPs lack the performance needed for future applications.

"We introduced our concepts of self-repairing reconfigurable chips to ESA in 2009, and explained that a multicore system can detect which parts of hardware are faulty and then can continue to process data with the healthy cores," said Gerard Rauwerda, CTO at Recore, in a statement. "ESA contracted us to embed it in a prototype with proven space concepts such as Leon processors and space-standard interfaces such as SpaceWire."



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MPPB systems architecture with Xentium DSPs and proven space components and interfaces. Source: Recore.